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The Meat Market on the Broadway in Bexleyheath where Edgington stole a knife to kill Sally Hodkin

A mentally disturbed woman who was freed after killing her mother was today convicted of murdering a grandmother.

Nicola Edgington was also found guilty of attempting to kill a third victim by a jury at the Old Bailey.

Her rampage after her release from hospital raises serious questions about alleged failures of the police, health workers and administrators.

Schizophrenic Edgington had killed her mother in November 2005 and was released from a secure mental hospital in September 2009.

Two years later she almost killed Kerry Clark, then 23, by a bus stop before she hacked to death 59-year-old Sally Hodkin.

As the jury delivered the verdicts, which they returned after just five hours and 24 minutes of deliberating, Mrs Hodkin's husband and children sobbed as they hugged one another.

Just hours before the murder, Edgington had been brought, begging to be sectioned, to a hospital by police officers.

In a series of 999 calls she warned the operator: “The last time I was feeling like this I killed my mum.”

The 32-year-old also made several calls to the medium security Bracton centre in Dartford, where she was treated following her mother’s death, and to her care workers.

But despite her warnings she was left alone at Oxleas House, a mental health assessment centre in Woolwich, and ran off to launch the attacks.

An Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation has been conducted into the role of the police and an internal review at the Bracton centre, part of the Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, has also concluded.

Two nurses who worked at Oxleas House were sacked after the incident. The inquiry found they did not “adequately identify the risk of her absconding” and also “failed to prevent” her from doing so.

It also concluded that the decision to discharge her from the Bracton Centre in 2009 was “appropriate” and that she received a “high quality” of care while being treated in the community.

She had pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and to murder, but admitted manslaughter of Mrs Hodkin on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

During the trial the court heard that in November 2005, Edgington, then 25, stabbed her church-going mother Marian nine times with a large kitchen knife.

She struck the night before what should have been a happy family reunion at the 60-year-old’s home in Forest Row, East Sussex.

Edgington was diagnosed schizophrenic and in October 2006 was ordered to be detained indefinitely after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

She was freed in September 2009 from the Bracton Centre, under strict conditions governing her continuing medical treatment, and lived alone in sheltered accommodation in Greenwich.

On 10 October 2011 she was brought to the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Woolwich at around 4am by two police officers, after she had had a row with a taxi driver in Greenwich, claiming she needed to be sectioned.

The court heard that PC Dan Phillips and PC Matthew Payne dropped her off so she could “get some sleep” and made no check on her through the police national computer.

As they left she chased after them, begging not to be left on her own, the court heard.

She was transferred to Oxleas House on the hospital site at 5.30am.

At 7am, as nurses were preparing a bed and medication, she ran off and took two buses to Bexleyheath.

By 9.30 she had bought a six-inch knife from an Asda store and launched a ferocious attack on Miss Clark who was listening to music as she waited for a bus to Dartford Heath. She managed to fight her off.

She then stole a 12-inch meat cleaver from a butcher’s shop and hacked to death Mrs Hodkin who had just left her Bexleyheath home on her way to the solicitors’ firm in Blackheath where she worked as an accounts manager.

The attack was “swift, forceful and truly ferocious”, the court heard.

Edgington stabbed her victim at least four times in the head and neck and left the knife sticking out of Mrs Hodkin’s throat.

She ran into a nearby shop and when the police arrived told them: “It was me, I did it.”

Consultant forensic psychiatrist Janet Parrot had treated Edgington while she was being held at the Bracton centre in Dartford and continued monthly meetings after her release.

She told the court that she last met with Edgington, who was prescribed a high dose of the anti-psychotic drug quetiapine on her release, on 22 September 2011 where she had shown “no recurrence of psychotic symptoms including paranoia, hallucinations or intrusive thoughts”.

However Dr Parrot said Edgington did show her some threatening text messages she had been receiving which could have hastened a relapse in her mental condition.

One of them was from a former partner referred to as M who texted “go kill yourself, you mad bitch”.

Community psychiatric nurse Tanya Biebuyck saw Edgington on 29 September and also saw “no evidence of psychosis or symptoms of her illness”.

The nurse said Edgington had never missed an appointment, had never failed a drug test and was not an excessive drinker.